Laboring to Mother in the Context of Past Trauma: The Transition to Motherhood

The occurrence of interpersonal trauma is a reality for many women, with effects that often persist long after the traumatic events end. The purpose of this feminist grounded theory study was to examine how past trauma shaped the lives of women as they became new mothers. We recruited a purposive sample of 32 women from two Canadian communities and conducted semistructured, dialogic interviews during the second trimester of pregnancy. We analyzed data using thematic content analytic methods, including open coding whereby we read transcripts line by line and applied codes to portions of text that illustrated concepts or themes. The substantive grounded theory, “laboring to mother in the context of past trauma,” describes the exceedingly difficult emotional and cognitive work undertaken by pregnant women with histories of trauma as they anticipate becoming mothers. In this article, we present key components of the theory and offer recommendations for health and social service providers

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One thing that we all agree on, is that it was dark when we left El Salvador. Some think it was night, evening, or just before day break. But all those that have a memory of that day in May remember that it was dark

Storying Shame: Humiliation in the Colonized Classroom

In this dissertation, I explore the use of shame and humiliation in schools as technologies of colonial violence. In particular, I draw from critical race and anti-colonial scholarship to situate colonialism as both violent and ongoing. My interests are in tracing systemic racism in classrooms as it exists through acts of humiliation and shaming. In this process, I am interested in examining the physicality of humiliation and shame: the subtle, metaphoric, and emotional ways in which shame weaves into and through bodies. Utilizing personal narrative and collective storytelling as my methods of analysis, I argue in this thesis that contextualizing and historicizing humiliation within a collective gathering of shame stories has the potential to bring the operation and ongoing effects of colonialism into a collective consciousness, one that has the potential to highlight the ways humiliation is bound to bodies and the ways in which racialized bodies are organized and educated in social spaces. In order to respect the multiple voices and experiences of this research project, I combined personal narrative and collective storytelling (Baskin, 2005; Mahoney, 2007) to explore the collective gathering of shame stories as an anti-racist practice. My focus is on expanding our understanding of student disengagement to account for the affective experiences of shaming. To do so, I draw on critical race theories that explore the corporeality of racism and the ways it operates through affective forms. My hope is that by focusing on the corporeal mechanisms at work in colonial technologies of shaming, this work will make meaningful contribution to anti-racist work on student disengagement and will support racialized students struggling with racism and oppression in classrooms across Canada.Ph.D